Her husband Alan Moore introduced her into his novel Voice Of The Fire as an ‘underground cartoonist late of Sausalito, California; former bondage model turned quarkweight boxer’. Melinda Gebbie flowered as an artist and writer during the San Francisco Seventies hippy comix explosion in Young Lust, Wimmen’s Comix, Wet Satin and her surreal 1977 solo Fresca Zizis (Italian for ‘fresh cocks’). Eight years later, mere months after moving to the UK, Fresca Zizis was seized in a vice raid and Gebbie was hauled up before a judge on obscenity charges to defend ‘depicting three women astride a giant green penis. His verdict was that all the comics should be confiscated and destroyed. They burned all 400 copies of my comic and made them illegal to possess in Britain.’ Luckily the same fate has not befallen Lost Girls, her three-volume porno-graphic novel, sixteen years in the making with Moore, in which they imagine the erotic destinies of children’s book heroines Alice, Wendy and Dorothy. Here, Gebbie’s exquisite hand-painted artistry shines referencing classic erotica from Schiele to Beardsley. ‘We just liked the idea of making everything as intricately sexual as possible, even the finest details. We were really influenced by things like the Yellow Book, by the grand old periods of illustration where there were beautiful designs on every page.’
A single-volume hardcover of Lost Girls was published in 2006.
Her husband Alan Moore introduced her into his novel Voice Of The Fire as an ‘underground cartoonist late of Sausalito, California; former bondage model turned quarkweight boxer’. Melinda Gebbie flowered as an artist and writer during the San Francisco Seventies hippy comix explosion in Young Lust, Wimmen’s Comix, Wet Satin and her surreal 1977 solo Fresca Zizis (Italian for ‘fresh cocks’). Eight years later, mere months after moving to the UK, Fresca Zizis was seized in a vice raid and Gebbie was hauled up before a judge on obscenity charges to defend ‘depicting three women astride a giant green penis. His verdict was that all the comics should be confiscated and destroyed. They burned all 400 copies of my comic and made them illegal to possess in Britain.’
Luckily the same fate has not befallen Lost Girls, her three-volume porno-graphic novel, sixteen years in the making with Moore, in which they imagine the erotic destinies of children’s book heroines Alice, Wendy and Dorothy. Here, Gebbie’s exquisite hand-painted artistry shines referencing classic erotica from Schiele to Beardsley. ‘We just liked the idea of making everything as intricately sexual as possible, even the finest details. We were really influenced by things like the Yellow Book, by the grand old periods of illustration where there were beautiful designs on every page.’